I enjoy reading your blog regularly, but I think you're off the mark on this one. It seems like your view of the world is a bit limited by the free-market economist's lens, and you don't take sufficiently into account people's emotions, perceived social injustices and our ingrained (evolutionary conditioned) desire for fairness.

The huge difference between redistributing GPA scores and wealth, which makes the whole argument a red herring is that the GPA, as a function of your efforts, is almost linear. The wealth distribution is vastly different from the GPA distribution. The people with most wealth do not put a hundred or a thousand time more effort than people with proportionally smaller net worth. Often times, it's quite the opposite. There are literally hundreds of millions people around the world that put much more hard work every day then, say, Larry Page ever did in his life. I am not saying Larry is a slacker by any means, I'm just saying that the outcome in the game of capitalism is heavily intertwined with luck as well as with being better than anyone else even by a small margin.

People sense it, and no matter what arguments you make, some people would still be discontent that a successful businessman who works, say, 10 hours a day, should enjoy a standard of living 50 times higher than a truck driver who works 9 hours a day. No matter what arguments you make, some people will always despise that.

I assure you, if the marks were given similarly to how wealth is distributed (Zipf-like distribution), there would be little objections to this idea. If the top 1-2 students got 4.0 while the majority had ~1.0, students would be outraged.

Another important point that you totally miss is that GPA does not reflect the quality of life. GPA scores does not directly dictate what you eat, where you live, if your house is air conditioned, do you walk or do you drive, whether you have a maid or if you mop your own floors. People intuitively know this as well.

I am honestly taken aback at how you could miss these points.

I am not making an argument against capitalism, I just want to remind you that there's an legitimate emotional reaction and even if we both agree that it's for the better of the mankind, you cannot claim that the existing wealth distribution reflects social justice. That would be a pretty twisted definition of justice. It reflects outcome of your work pretty well, but not your effort. I am not saying the world should be just, it's obviously not, and it's probably for the better, but there are strong evolutionary forces in our brain striving for justice. Making such comparisons is just silly.

Alternatively, we have already shown that the free market works for necessities of life like food. Lets open up the market for GPA points so that they are freely purchasable and tradable on efficient markets. I think we will quickly see the inefficiency of everybody having to earn their own GPA in class makes as much sense as everybody having to build their own car or as giving government a monopoly on primary education.